Melissa Red Hoffman was “feeling really stuck” last summer. A 50-year-old surgeon in Asheville, N.C., Hoffman had been struggling with long COVID since getting infected with the coronavirus two and a half years earlier. “Deafening fatigue” was one of her worst symptoms, she says. “I feel tired behind my eyes from the moment I get up to the moment I go to sleep.” She managed to work part time, but much of her work had shifted to administrative tasks that she did from her couch.
Then she found Remission Biome. It’s a research project started in early 2023 by Tamara Romanuk and Tess Falor, two people with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS, a chronic disease that shares symptoms with long COVID. Project participants have taken medical research into their own hands to determine whether and how changes to their gut bacteria can improve their health. After an initial test with three participants led to some symptom relief, Romanuk and Falor announced last July that they would recruit 50 people with ME/CFS, long COVID or both for a larger test of the project’s protocol.
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